Dr. Spencer explores "free choice" as humanity’s ability to override instincts—unlike animals, who act purely on survival or reproduction—by citing cave paintings and firefighters risking their lives. He critiques political determinism, where parties like Cambridge Analytica use demographics to suppress votes, exemplified by Jagmeet Singh’s targeted Canadian ads assuming voters won’t change minds. Yet, he argues free choice persists: humans defy even strong drives (like procreation) for art or societal progress, proving resistance to manipulation is possible. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, here today with Jeff.
How are you doing, Jeff?
Not too bad, buddy.
How about you?
Great.
Before we get into the topic today, just a reminder to everyone that if you disagree with anything we're saying, you want to give feedback, you want to tell us about some of the thought you had that was tangentially related, absolutely fine.
Send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Aside from that, we're going to move right into it.
Today's topic is a thing that I have thought about a great deal.
It's a thing that I call free choice.
I'm going to describe exactly what that is just momentarily.
So this came about, this idea came about for me because I was asked once about free will.
And I came up with a definition, which I'm going to describe in a few minutes.
But later on in my life, I thought about this a great deal and I put it into my head and I churned it through the machine many, many times and I refined it and I added to it and compared against different things and it only told me more about the world and I thought it was so wonderful.
And then I did some more reading and I found out that people who philosophically or professionally work on the idea of free will, they have a completely different definition of free will.
And so I was stuck with my definition, which was not even the same.
It didn't disagree either.
It was just about a different thing entirely.
And I was stuck in that anytime I tried to talk to anyone about it, I was talking about a thing that was different.
And so I had to come up with a new name for my thing, which was the thing I call free choice.
So I feel like I should say why it's different from free will by defining free will now.
So free will is the idea that you might be able to make a decision that is not determined by your genetics, biology, and situation.
That seems pretty simple.
People make decisions all the time and they feel in their mind, their conscious mind, that they're making their decisions.
And they are.
But we feel there's an idea in philosophy called determinism, which is that all of the factors that were going to lead to you making that decision were always in play in your head before you made that decision and they weren't going to be any different.
And therefore, it's difficult to understand why anyone would have chosen anything other than the decision they chose.
So this is compared to sort of you might compare it to a roulette wheel.
If you knew the speed of the roulette wheel as it was going to spin and the speed of the ball as it was released onto the roulette wheel, you could, through a set of very complicated set of geometry and mathematics, determine which number it was going to land on.
But it's very, very, very complicated.
And there's really only two factors here.
Well, kind of three, if there's a breeze in the room of any kind, but just two factors, the speed of the ball and the speed of the wheel and where it first, at what position it's first released at.
But it's still incredibly difficult.
And to my knowledge, no one has ever actually calculated this with any real accuracy as to which number it's going to fall on.
But the wheel was released at a certain time and the wheel had a certain speed and the ball at a certain speed.
And if it landed on the number eight, then it was always going to land on number eight.
There was no chance really that it was going to land on anything else other than the number eight.
And that's it.
Yeah, still like without we're talking about like physics, right?
Right.
Right.
This is, this is talking about like determinism takes that basis found in a hard science and shifts it across to the human psyche, which is arguably a hell of a lot more complicated.
Way more complicated, many orders of magnitude more complicated.
But all of the things that they discover about the human psyche and about your body chemistry and about the little bits of biochemistry that are going on in your brain, etc.
It doesn't appear like any of these leave any room for any extra decisions to be made.
They're all all the particles in your body have a direction and a momentum.
And all of those factors add up to you making the set of decisions you make and that you made in your life.
And if you reversed time to back to a certain moment in your life and then you hit play again to go forward again, you were never going to make any other decisions.
That's what determinism says.
It's not proven because in order to prove it, they would have to actually work out all of the factors and accurately predict what a person's decisions were going to be before they made them.
So it's in flux as to whether free will or determinism is exactly the deciding factor, but those two things oppose each other.
Here's what I said when I was first asked 25 years ago or whatever, when I was first asked by someone I knew to define free will.
And I was a little flippant at the time.
I think it was just in a coffee house and trying to be humorous.
And I said that free will was the ability when you know what the right thing to do is to do the wrong thing anyway.
And, you know, that doesn't seem very scientific, but I felt that that was real.
That was true.
That was still a truism of the world that, and it's a very human thing to do.
If you, it's very human to be able to know what the right thing to do is and be able to do the wrong thing anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you don't need to look hard in your own life and your own memories in order to know, to see this happen, I think.
Everyone.
Well, I think probably, I think probably the most recent and poignant example that we could draw on, and we'll probably pick up a few trolls off this one, is COVID and vaccination.
Well, sure.
Right?
Like lots of people were rallying and crying for mandated vaccinations.
Lots of people were saying were fighting to maintain their free choice to decide to do the wrong thing and not get their vaccination is what it boiled down to.
Yeah.
And where that exactly sits in the greater context of ethics is not what we're going to discuss here.
But if you ever did anything your parents didn't want you to do, you were experiencing this 100%.
But of course, once I dig deep into this, you know, even the surface level, I run into an immediate problem, which is the sort of what you might call fundamental problem of philosophy, which is what is right and wrong.
Because this whole definition relies on there being a right and a wrong thing.
And of course, if you can't really define right and wrong, you're stuck in trying to parse these things and trying to determine that if nothing is wrong and nothing is right, then this definition I have for free choice is meaningless.
Yeah.
But I do have one thing I can think of, which I think is probably some level of right and wrong, which is that we do, we are animals who have instincts.
So, as soon as I realized this, and I probably realized this about 15 years ago when I was thinking about this, and it kind of was a light bulb moment going off in my head, and I could finally move past this problem of right and wrong.
We, as humans, are able to make decisions that completely contradict our instincts on a regular basis.
So, non-human animals generally seem to have a constraint on their collection of decisions that we just don't have.
And we do, we are influenced by our instincts, but it is by far not the only factor in determining how we decide in each moment.
So, it could be said that humans are partly constrained by our instincts.
And animals are almost entirely, or perhaps are entirely constrained to the set of decisions available by their instincts.
So, I usually demonstrate this by example by saying that every once in a while, you'll hear about a dog that runs into a burning building to rescue a family member or something.
But this is a rare occurrence.
Most dogs will not do this.
They will whimper outside the building and just hope that everyone gets out.
Because it is the most absolute, basic, brute, universal animal survival instinct to fear fire above all.
It's yeah, dogs can be near fire.
I had a dog as a kid, we had a lot of picnic fires, and the dog was nearby.
That's fine, but the dog, you know, obviously, you could never coax the dog near the fire.
Not that I ever tried, but I knew that there was just no doing it.
There was the dog was never going to go closer than a certain amount of the fire, and there wasn't anything anyone could ever do about it.
If I was too close to the fire, the dog didn't even want to come close to me.
But humans do this all the time.
In fact, some of us are trained specifically to do this.
And that's interesting, too, is that some humans need to be trained in this, you know, entering burning building thing in order to do it on a regular basis.
We call them firefighters.
And they do need training.
And part of that training is to help them to not become, you know, panicking when they're surrounded by fire in a burning building.
That's part of the overall training.
So that instinct is still there on some level.
It's just not wrapping them up in a cocoon that they just can't get out of.
So here's, once I came to this conclusion about this, this idea that we have humans have this ability that we might call free choice.
And I thought about it in the context of instincts.
I thought I was really onto something.
We have many sort of instinctive switches inside us.
Some people are just afraid of spiders and we feel that that's on some level, some level of instinct.
And some people have a fear of snakes and we feel that that's some, you know, something going on there too.
And, you know, nearly all of us will get a strong reaction if you're ever near like a cougar or a tiger because those large, fearsome predators do make the hackles rise in our neck because they feel dangerous to us on a level.
But aside from that, we just have three general areas of instinctive choices.
One is about short-term survival, moment-to-moment survival, that is, right?
So this is survival from things that will kill you immediately.
Don't get eaten by the predator, yeah.
Right.
If you're avoiding the mountain lion, then you're going to live longer than the Cro-Magnon that didn't avoid the mountain lion.
Don't step in the fire.
Right.
Don't step in the, yeah, right.
So short-term survival is what would keep dogs out of burning buildings, generally speaking, right?
We have another area called about long-term survival, you know, food, shelter, storing food for other seasons.
We see a lot of animals have this behavior.
Squirrels, they collect nuts in different caches and whatnot.
And it's not always just one spot.
They have many different spots.
And I think we mentioned this in the previous podcast about squirrels.
They're very interesting.
Yeah.
And then we have a third general area, which is about procreation, a drive to do the acts that lead to biological procreation.
All the creatures that we would describe as animals have these three things all in there somewhere.
And, you know, they have some individual things that they do, but those individual things, those small things, are related to one of these three general areas.
So when we study creatures, like a classic example is foxes and rabbits.
When you have an area of, you know, an environment that there's rabbits and there's a fox who feeds on the rabbits, whenever you have a condition that allows for more rabbits than you would normally have, the next season, you'll inevitably have more foxes.
And the reason for this is extremely simple.
It's because all the time and effort that the group of foxes put into finding rabbits and eating them, you know, they go through all this effort to survive.
And the leftover time they have is put toward procreation.
And the easier it is to find food, the more time they have to procreate.
And the more time and effort they put into that.
And of course, having abundance of food also allows for less starvation.
So some more of them don't starve and they live to be adults.
And so you'll just get more foxes sort of the year after you have more rabbits.
And this is sort of usually in science classes.
I think you learn it in like sixth grade or fifth grade or something.
And they talk about this as being part of this balance in nature that you'll get more rabbits and then later on you'll get more foxes.
And then, you know, they'll eat more of the rabbits and then there'll be less rabbits and the foxes will die off and you know, on we go.
Yeah, I watched a really interesting documentary on how the wolves brought the trees and grass back to Yosemite.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
That I think there was a meme that was made about that where they listened to all the things.
It was really interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because basically the predators got reintroduced to the environment because humans meddled and thought that they weren't needed.
And so all of the herbivores, free from needs to worry about short-term survival, because they no longer had any apex predators killing their young and old, they did nothing but procreate.
And it was a national park.
There was no shortage of food supply for them.
And it actually hit the point where they started like stripping the landscape of foliage completely.
Yeah.
And changing the landscape around them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then you had erosion issues and washouts and floods and everything else that came with it.
And then they brought the wolves back and everything reversed.
But the idea that the animals will divert all of their extra energy that, you know, all their free time they have now that the rabbits are easy to catch to making more fox babies.
That's how nature works.
Everyone who's a zoologist kind of, you know, if I'm getting this wrong and you are a zoo, and you are a zoologist, please contact me.
We'll talk about where I got this wrong.
But that's how I understand it.
So humans, at some point, somewhere we think around about a million-ish years ago, we started doing something different.
We started making decisions with things to do with our extra time that weren't merely about making more babies.
I mean, we did make more babies, but we also made art and probably music.
The music wasn't recorded, so we don't have any records.
Evidence of it.
If there were musical instruments, they were of a kind that didn't survive that age.
They were probably drumming on rocks or something like that, right?
We think drums were the first musical instrument.
But humans are really the only animal that really makes music.
So that's another thing that's really unique about us.
We keep a beat, whereas the animals that seem to be closest to being able to also make music are birds.
And birds just seem to be terrible at keeping a beat.
It's really strange, right?
They've done studies and they just aren't that good at it.
They make songs, but they don't.
The songs don't have a recognizable even tempo.
Yeah.
And they, you know, you can recognize them and they recognize their own songs for their own species, but they don't seem to be able to keep a beat.
They don't, that's not how they deal with music, apparently.
Their musical engine in their brains is different than ours, I guess you could say, right?
Because they just do it differently.
But we make art.
We appear to be the only species that makes art, real art, unless you count songbirds as making art.
But it appears like mostly they're doing it to find mates.
So, you know, it's purposeful driven art.
Well, one could argue that maybe that was the original purpose of a lot of human-made art as well.
Maybe.
When I think about something like a cave painting, like some that have been found, you know, a lot of them are scenes of hunting.
It's interesting because it tells us maybe something about how they hunted, but it's often seen as a way where they're bragging about the hunt.
I have a different take.
I think that the very first art, as in making some kind of shape of some kind to show someone else, was probably one that was never going to last because it was probably drawn with a stick in the dirt.
And it probably was not meant to impress someone with their drawing skills.
It was probably meant to work out a plan for how to hunt the animal that they're trying to hunt.
Caribou, mammoth, whatever.
And this stick drawing, the very first one was so successful, they did others.
And this probably helped with all sorts of things.
But when I look at things like cave drawings, I think it's probably, if you're going to put so much effort into this thing that for them must have been a considerable effort, you don't have any other tools probably to do anything with.
And certainly all the tools you have are probably meant for hunting.
How do you come across the ability to do all these things?
It's this making art like this.
It was probably more to help teach other people in the tribe and new generations in the tribe about the method of hunting.
I mean, if your first art that you make is to draw in the dirt and have a plan for hunting the mammoth, then it makes sense that you came up with these plans and you have these complicated plans and you're older now, you don't participate in the hunt, but you want to teach the younger kids who are going to go out on the hunt how to do it.
Well, you might get frustrated at your the few words you've come up with to explain it because you don't have a great and complex language like any of the languages we have now.
You might have 30 words.
Yeah.
And it's not very complicated.
So trying to give a detailed plan of how to attack the mammoth successfully, more successfully than perhaps they already could, you know, words probably fail you.
You might turn to drawings because they worked so good before.
Why wouldn't they?
And this process, this extra time we put into things like art just isn't part of our instinct.
You know, by the measure of only the things that we would find in instinct, we would never have done art.
And it doesn't look like any of the other animals do this thing called art either, because they appear to be, you know, confined by the decisions available to them by instinct alone, generally speaking.
So your thesis for this episode then is that art and music are evidence in and of themselves of the existence of free choice.
Yes, of the ability to make decisions that are outside of our instincts.
Okay.
So I thought I'd get more pushback on that.
Well, yeah.
I just don't know which angle to push back from.
I would like to walk back and sort of touch back on determinism there because there was one thing that popped up on those on those lines.
There's sort of a change in political philosophy in a lot of Western democracies where the politicians and the parties are recognizing people are going to vote how they're going to vote.
And we're not trying to change their mind.
We're trying to convince the people who would vote for us to show up.
And we're trying to prevent the people who would vote against us from showing up.
Voter suppression.
Yeah.
That's voter suppression has been very common in a lot of places that you wouldn't even.
But again, you can't have, you can't have voter suppression if you don't believe that you know what someone is going to decide.
Like unless you know how someone's going to vote, you have no interest in suppressing that vote.
Right?
Yeah.
So I'm surprised you're hesitating at that.
That's a pretty simple fact, in my opinion.
Like to perform an act of voter suppression, a politician would need to be pretty goddamn positive that the people whose votes he's suppressing are for parties other than his.
Otherwise, why would he suppress those votes?
Well, I'm not hesitating based on that fact.
I'm more hesitating based on trying to link it to determinism itself.
I mean, you might say that demographically, people of a certain demographic vote more strongly toward party X than they do toward party Y. Demographics is such an 80s and 90s political science, man.
Like it's gotta be, it's gotten way more refined than that.
It's carved far more precisely now.
There's there's far more divisions in the demographical equation that they have because there's people of this demographic are all, you know, below the age of 28 and all have jobs of a certain type and they all have they all, you know, I mean, they have many, many more categories.
Demographics in the 80s was just age and ethnicity, pretty much.
Yeah.
And now it's like now it's much more complicated, but it is still demographics that they're dealing with.
And they're looking at it like, well, you know, we can't say the way Martha Rogers over here is definitely going to vote, but we can say that this entire neighborhood is almost all peopled by people of this tax bracket and, you know, this sort of age group.
Maybe they're families here and they all have, they tend to have children.
Not everyone in that neighborhood has children, but they tend to.
They, you know, whatever percentage they have and they have it worked out very, very closely, more closely every year, by the way.
And they know something about that.
And then they know that people in this category, because they did all the polling, that, you know, they tried to work out the age and the neighborhood they were in and all the things that related to that, all the points.
And of course, this is, of course, what Cambridge Analytica did far more successfully, which is they collected all the data from Facebook, which gave them a lot more data points to make more precise demographics with, is that people of these varieties tend to vote the other way, and people of these varieties tend to vote our way.
And then, of course, the magic of Facebook and internet is that you get to target those ones for your ads.
So you can put the legacy hero ad for the ones that are going to vote for you and encourage them to get out to vote.
And then you can put some other ad that's really not an ad for your guy, but a smear for the other person in the other category.
And you can exactly give that to them based on their demographic as determined by Facebook.
And you don't have to mail anything.
It's so interesting.
But this is that you just talked right past my point right there, which is I don't believe that the political parties are doing that.
I don't believe that they're saying, oh, well, we know these guys are going to vote for us.
So let's place the hero ads to get them to feel good about that.
And we know those guys might vote for the other guy.
So let's put the smear campaign over there.
That's not how it works.
They say, these are the guys that are going to vote for us.
Those are the guys that aren't.
Let's write those guys off and not spend any advertising dollars on them at all.
And let's focus all of our advertising on these guys.
And because we know these guys, this particular demographic has a penchant towards racism, for example, let's put a bunch of really derogatory ads about Jagmeet Singh out there, which for those of you who aren't in Canada is the current leader of the NDP party here and happens to be Sikh.
But like, my point is like they don't do it to figure out how to flavor their advertising.
They do it to figure out where their voters are and just work on motivating those guys.
And that's what I'm talking about with political determinism.
Like this Cambridge, thank you for the Cambridge Analytica thing, because I knew there was, I couldn't recall the name of the organization that did that.
It made quite a few waves in Canadian politics last federal election, I believe.
And I was talking with a buddy about it who said that he watched a news interview with one of the folks at Cambridge.
And this guy confidently declared that if he could get access to just a handful of factors or facts about a person, he could predict with 100% accuracy how that person was going to vote.
And all of those facts are available if you participate in social media.
Yeah.
But the thing you must know, and maybe you're just not aware of it, is that Cambridge Analytica did exactly that.
They didn't just do it in the U.S. election in 2016.
They did it in several other elections in the few years before the US election 2016, in which they also did it, where they specifically targeted certain demographics to discourage them from voting.
Yeah, that's my point.
It's not about they're not researching how people are going to vote so they can change people's minds on who they should vote for.
They're researching how people are going to vote so they can get the people that will vote for them to the polls and convince the people that aren't going to vote for them not to go to the polls.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Which is voter suppression and super dirty pool in a democracy.
Right.
But it's, but it's, it's, it's rooted.
It's rooted in a philosophy, I think, that dovetails pretty nicely with this thing we're talking about with determinism.
Because the base thesis is people aren't going to change their minds.
They're going to vote how they're going to vote.
So let's find the guys that are going to vote for us and like lay the breadcrumbs to the polling booth for them.
And let's find the people that aren't going to vote for us and send them out into the wilderness so they miss voting day.
I think the thing to mention then about this is that you aren't constrained by any of those things, really.
You can still choose to make a decision that goes against whatever smear campaign is being portrayed to you.
The first thing to do would be to realize that it is a smear campaign.
And then, you know, you have the ability, many people would call it willpower, to make a decision that contradicts that one and to decide to do it anyway.
It's literally the ability when you know what the right thing to do is to do the wrong thing anyway.
If someone is telling you the right thing to do would be to not vote, you could do the wrong thing in that scenario that you're being told is the wrong thing and just vote anyway.
You have that power.
Everyone has that power.
You were born with it.
It's the same power that would allow you to go into a burning building and save a loved one that would allow you to overcome any level of propaganda that comes at you, any level of voter suppression that's pushed into your mind, any of that stuff.
Everyone has the ability to move past it and just do it anyway.
I mean, I started this podcast because I want to affect something that I see as negatively affecting our world.
And as soon as I say that, people say, well, you're never going to be able to do that.
And I say, well, maybe, but I won't really know unless I try it.
Right.
Yeah.
And even if I don't, if I inspire someone else to also try, and then they go on and do it, well, I get an assist on that point, right?
Yeah, pebble in the pool.
Yeah.
And the more people that don't give up on the world, on the people that are working so hard to veer the thing towards one ditch or the other, you don't just give up because they're more vigorous than you are.
And they probably are more vigorous than you are, by the way.
Fanatics and zealots almost always are more vigorous than average people.
But you outnumber them.
You don't need to be more vigorous than them.
You can just stay the course as a reasonable person and continue your life and don't let them affect you.
Continue to vote the way you were going to vote, regardless of whatever smear campaign is pushed into your mind space.
Continue to, you know, be happy and smile at people because they're just people and be polite and all the things that make society good.
Do those things still, even if it's a dirty and ugly world that just allowed people to rob you and steal all your stuff and take your car for a joyride and burn it, or all the negative things that can happen to you that take things away from you, chip away at you.
You don't have to be subject only to those.
You have the ability to choose to do something else, anything else, other than just be whatever the negative bullies of the world want you to be.
And that's the point: is that if we have an ability that can overcome our instinct to procreate, we have the ability to literally do anything because that one is a strong one.
Yeah, it's very strong.
Yeah.
And so have at it.
Do the things you really want to do and really do the things that make the world better.